Why God made grandparents

I’m convinced that somewhere over the years and many translations of the book of Genesis, a couple of pages were left out. While we know what God did on Days 1 thru 7 of creation, it’s Day 10 that counts. On Day 10, God, in all Her infinite wisdom, created grandparents.

By Day 10, the average human mother had played 20 games of Candy Land, listened to approximately 300 knock-knock jokes, read the entire collected workings of Dr. Seuss 12 times, and scraped six different shades of Play-Doh off of the kitchen floor. If you’ve never seen what reading that much Dr. Seuss can do to a woman, you’ll know when she opens her mouth: “Please pass the bread I said. Do you need a dish for fish? Would you like it red or blue? Does the baby need one too?”

So God created grandparents so the species would survive. It doesn’t matter how beastly a child is acting, his grandparents can always find a reason for the behavior that does not reflect directly on the child. “Oops, looks like somebody’s tired.” “Too much excitement opening all those presents today.” “That much sugar disrupts the delicate balance of little bodies.” Are these really the same people who raised my siblings and me?

My son loves to go to his grandparents’ houses. Besides having novel toys to play with, there is no one in the world except for your grandma who will let you choose a movie, and then watch “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” six times in the middle of July when the heat index is 113 degrees outside. The same woman who once condemned cereal boxes with manically happy cartoon characters due to high sugar content, can now declare ice cream before dinner perfectly acceptable without batting an eyelash. So we try not to take it personally when, having spent the night with Grandma and Papa, R takes one look at us on their doorstep and immediately bursts into tears (and believe me, they are not tears of joy because he has missed us so much).

I think it’s great that my kids live so close to both sets of grandparents though. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve chosen to live here, rather than say, Maui. There’s something special about the relationship between children and their grandparents. I hope R and K know that their parents love them completely and unconditionally. We try to always be present for them, to eat dinner together as a family, and tuck everybody in with hugs and kisses at the end of the day.

But grandparents have the luxury of sitting on the floor for hours; stacking and restacking towers of blocks while the kids take turns knocking them over. With no thoughts of how much laundry is piling up or worries over that cherry popsicle stain on the carpet that will set without immediate attention, grandparents can spend those 10 extra minutes at the park. Grandparents get to be the “yes-men.”

Of course, the real winners here are the parents. After God finished creating grandparents, and shipped all children to their houses for the weekend, She sat back on the couch (after having first removed the collection of pointy Ninja Turtle accessories from between the cushions), looked at all that She had made, and saw that it was very good.